Review by Steve Bennett

It’s cost him a lot of money, but Mike Ward has a simple pitch for Edinburgh. For he is the Canadian comedian ordered to pay just under £25,000 after making jokes about a disabled child.

The gags themselves might not exactly endear you to him. As you may have seen reported, the comic said 13-year-old Jérémy Gabriel, who suffers a rare genetic condition, wasn’t disabled but just plain ‘ugly’, as part of a bad-taste joke in which that the child still hadn’t died, five years after singing for the Pope in Rome, a trip organised because he was terminally ill.

It’s hardly a charming line in its intended comedy-club environment, let alone repeated in the sterile, legal environment of a human rights tribunal or the judgemental pages of a newspaper. But that’s the thing about freedom of speech; it has to include the freedom to say the vile if it’s to have any meaning.

Ward’s ongoing ordeal – he’s launching a legal appeal – is the premise of his Edinburgh debut, which allows him to tell bad-taste jokes, but in the context of a storytelling show making the case for the defence, rather than a volley of putrid invective.

The case involving Gabriel – who told the tribunal that Ward’s jokes, released on a DVD, made him think ‘my life is worth less than another's because I'm handicapped’ – is just the latest in a series of run-ins the controversial comic has had over his material. He’s been sued before, received death threats and been confronted after gigs.

Some backlash is no surprise. Even here, in a relatively polite Edinburgh show, he touches on bestiality, necrophilia and paedophilia, all in the space of a couple of minutes. In context – that crucial word – they are not especially offensive.

Ward is essentially an elevated crude club comedian, saying the allegedly shocking to grab attention and provoke a reaction. A lot of them are fairly boilerplate for the genre, easy jibes about Catholic priests and little boys for example, though he has maybe half a dozen brutally inventive gags in his repertoire, which you have to admire on a technical level, if not a moral one.

If he’s a shock comic in his native Quebec, he’s more measured here. He gets the jokes in, as well as cheerily painting himself as a maverick mischief-maker, emphasising the fact he’s a normal person with a peculiar job, not just some monster who calls disabled kids frauds to their face.

Even if you didn’t think so before, you come away from Freedom of Speech Isn't Free thinking Ward’s been hard done by, and that the law shouldn’t be invoked just to stop people saying unpleasant things. And although he says those things, he also some pretty sensible ones too.

Review date: 5 Aug 2016
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Underbelly George Square